Sprint announced last week that the company has canceled plans to carry the Sprint 4G BlackBerry PlayBook which would have run on Sprint’s highspeed WiMAX network. Paget Alves, president of Sprint’s business markets group, said “It’s an interesting concept, it just hasn’t caught on with business customers as much as they would like.” Although the cancellation of the Sprint 4G BlackBerry seems like another black eye for RIM, I believe this decision has a lot more to do with Sprint’s bad bet on WiMAX when the rest of earth is going to LTE.
After Sprint’s announcement that they wouldn’t carry the WiMAX 4G BlackBerry Playbook, RIM put out a statement of their own.
RIM has decided to prioritize and focus its 4G development resources on LTE. We remain excited and committed to delivering innovative and powerful 4G tablets to the US market together with our carrier partners. Testing of BlackBerry 4G PlayBook models is already underway and we plan to enter labs for network certifications in the US and other international markets this fall.
WiMax is just not catching on with Sprint like the company had hoped. I am not so sure that the cancellation of Sprint’s 4G BlackBerry PlayBook really will mean all that much to RIM’s bottom line…
[Via CrackBerry]
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